She read for a long time. He drank the chai she had made and didn't try to explain anything while she read. Outside her window the apartment complex was doing its evening routine. Someone practicing keyboard badly on the second floor. A couple arguing in the flat above. The smell of someone's dinner.

The chanting ran underneath all of it.

Priya turned pages without commenting. She went back to certain passages, re-read them, turned more pages. When she had a question she asked it briefly and he answered and she went back to reading.

Then she stopped at a page near the middle of the second notebook.

"Yeh sun," she said. She read out a passage. Four lines that had arrived together in every session. The cold floor. The doorway. The smell. And a fourth detail he had marked with three asterisks because it appeared more than anything else. The sound of water that was not moving.

"Haan. Yeh baar baar aata hai."

"Yeh kisi jagah ka description hai."

He had thought this. But hearing someone else say it made it real in a different way.

Priya was already on her phone. Not tourist websites. Not Google Maps. Something else, deeper. City heritage records, municipal documentation, the kind of thing that exists in archives and nowhere else.

"Cold floor even in summer," she said, half to herself. "Doorway without a door. Standing water. Abandoned. Old structure." She scrolled. Stopped.

She turned her phone toward him. 

A photograph. Low resolution, from a heritage documentation project. An old structure. Stone. The photograph was taken from outside, looking in through an opening where a door had once been. The floor inside was stone. The text beneath described a partially collapsed stepwell, the water table below still active, cold even in peak summer because of the underground source.

"Kitna door hai?" 

"Teen kilometre. Us dhabe se jahan pehli baar suna tha."

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Priya put her phone down on the table. She looked at it for a second, not at him.

"Main nahi jaanti kya hoga wahan," she said. "Ya hoga bhi kuch ya nahi." She picked up her chai. "Par map pe hai. Toh chalte hain."

It was the most honest thing either of them had said about any of this.

The chanting that night was the clearest it had ever been. Like something that had been trying to give directions for weeks and had finally been understood.

"Kal chalte hain?" Priya said.

"Haan."

"Daytime. Practical. Dekh ke aate hain."

"Haan."

He went home. Lay in the dark. Did not write anything that night. Just listened to the chanting the way you listen to something you finally understand is trying to take you somewhere. Following its phrases the way you follow a road you've been on before but only now recognize.

Tomorrow he would go.